Kobe Bryant’s Comeback Quickly Derails

Lakers guard Kobe Bryant chews on his jersey during, Monday’s game against the Atlanta Hawks.

Forget the platitudes, the incoherent Lakers fans on Twitter, the amount of animal metaphors you can use to describe Kobe Bean Bryant. (A wounded hyena laughing maniacally as he lashes out at his attackers; a prowling leopard hunting for children; a proud elephant who remembers each and every slight; you get the idea.) The real fact is that men of Kobe Bryant’s age do not come back from multiple serious leg injuries, especially not when their job is to run up and down a wooden floor for hours at a time.

This seems obvious. And yet there was still a reaction to the news that Kobe fractured a bone in his left knee that went along the lines of, “He’ll be fine!” The official prognosis is just six weeks, but with the Lakers not exactly a contender with or without him—going into Friday they were sitting a game under .500—it wouldn’t seem prudent to rush the healing process. Kobe was gung-ho to return after tearing his Achilles last season, and, well, this was the result. News that he’d apparently played out the rest of Tuesday’s game after sustaining the injury seemed less the mark of a brave man and more the death wish of someone refusing to accept their body’s limitations at this point in their career, with thousands of minutes accrued on those unforgiving courts. If there’s any silver lining, it’s that he doesn’t need surgery—he just has to sit back and let his body work its magic without rushing the process. We already know what it looks like when things are expedited. “I take no joy in being correct about this, because the NBA is a better, more interesting and more purely competitive place with Kobe Bryant in it,” Ken Berger writes for CBS Sports. “But the potential for injuries to parts of his body other than the surgically repaired left Achilles’ tendon was the single biggest fear heading into his rehab and comeback.”

Of course, the mitigating factor in his ability to return is the fact that Kobe, as much as he ever did, insists he is still one of the game’s premier superstars, which is privately and publicly doubted around the league. “Six weeks beats six months, yes, but Bryant is 35 years old, and time is running shorter and shorter. Yes, it could’ve been worse on Thursday, but it’s still so discouraging, so deflating,” writes Yahoo’s Adrian Wojnarowski Kobe Bryant isn’t simply trying to play basketball again. He’s trying to be great again, trying to chase his own standards, his own ghosts, and the climb back gets only steeper now.” But Kobe can beat all of that, can’t he? He’s a hyena, a leopard, an elephant, the mamba, one of the game’s elemental forces. He’s also an old guy with a bum leg, which no amount of social media validation can change. Sports Illustrated’s Ron Mahoney puts it best when he writes, “To those who believe Bryant to be above such conventional timetables – as if his every fiber were fundamentally stronger than that of a mere human — let this be a harrowing, unfortunate lesson.”

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There are parts of Qatar that seem so ostentatious and aesthetically unexplainable as though the genie from Aladdin had suddenly decided to become a city planner. There is modern art that has been purchased from under the nose of the rest of the world’s leading museums, contracted workers redefining the meaning of indentured servitude in the 21st century, temperatures that are charitable described as “oppressive” and will certainly make it incredibly difficult, if not outright impossible, for the World Cup to be played in 2022 without the players boiling to a crisp on the pitch. It’s a city transformed by money, a testament to the power of capital when given free reign to transform what was formerly a desert patch into a futuristic metropolis; it’s also just a deeply strange place, which former Fixer David Roth uncovered when he recently visited for SB Nation. In a five-part series due to conclude on Friday, he explores the city as a luxury brand and contemplates why the World Cup would be brought here. At one point, he observes a game of soccer between low-level visiting teams and imagines how things will be different in 8 years.

“This was the same game that would bring all those people to Qatar, of course, but also different. What the emir is buying from FIFA is a complicated investment product, which can indeed be bought and brought to the middle of the desert without any diminution in value. It is a thing traded among very rich people, like art or any other commodity,” he writes. “This is not an idle comparison. Art has value because it has value; Qatar’s whole brave, fraught investment in the World Cup has no value if not for the game that brought all those tired men to the Doha Sports Stadium that night. But the game, by itself, is just one of the world’s favorite things to do; the World Cup is not just soccer. And anyway Qatar is not just buying the World Cup. It’s an investment, like every dollar the nation spends on any other masterpiece.”

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On the other side of the spectrum is Brazil, which will host the World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in 2016 amidst wide inequality and a government-endorsed construction industry that’s received inhuman amounts of money to build structures that will most likely not be finished by the time the events kick off. Despite the promise of transparency over how much each project costs, the irony is that the values differ depending on what website you look at. ESPN’s Wright Thompson spent some time in Brazil with protesters of today and yesterday, the former eager to make a difference and the latter sitting in cautious skepticism because of their memories. He meets mothers of teenagers mistakenly shot by police, watches a budding photographer win a prestigious award for his work chronicling the violence, and arrives at a breathtakingly metaphorical conclusion too haunting to spoil. It’s a place where something has to change, and a soccer tournament doesn’t seem like it’ll help.

“There’s really no way to know if the World Cup will come and go peacefully or if a million people will once again demand change. Last month, when I went to Brazil looking for clues about what might happen next summer, I found all the players assembled for a battle that happens over and over again. It’s reborn in every place and in every time, yet it still manages to surprise us, whether it’s the cafés of Paris in 1788 or the mountains of Cuba in 1957, or perhaps, San Francisco in 1967,” he writes. “Brazil in the shadow of the World Cup is one of those places, and right now is one of those times. The weird energy makes sense after a while: the alchemy of a dedicated minority of a generation first believing it can change a country, and being willing to derail the world’s most famous sporting event to do so, set against the menace and authority of a nation willing to use violence to protect itself from the folly of youth.”

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